


disenchanted

by virginianwolfsnake



Category: A Series of Unfortunate Events (TV), A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
Genre: F/M, Gen, vfd is bad in numerous ways
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-20
Updated: 2020-08-20
Packaged: 2021-03-07 02:21:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26009443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virginianwolfsnake/pseuds/virginianwolfsnake
Summary: beatrice and bertrand don’t want to leave everything behind. but what choice do they have?
Relationships: Beatrice Baudelaire/Bertrand Baudelaire
Comments: 5
Kudos: 11





	disenchanted

Beatrice’s disinterest in having visitors from their past has only strengthened in the past few years. At first, she was cautiously accepting of Jacques singing to Violet in her crib, or Kit helping her to place the shapes in the right slots of her game. Once, Monty even bought her an anthology of animals, and spent an entire afternoon leafing through the pages, pointing at the pictures and comically making the noises of each. But her suspicion has developed over the years, no doubt as she begins to conceptualise that her own recruitment took place when she was three. It is terrifying to them both that it will be only a matter of months until Violet is three, too.

Klaus is still so new and fragile, like a baby bird fallen from a nest, and he hasn’t had lullabies sung to him in Jacques soothing baritone or games with Kit or animal sounds from Monty. When Beatrice looks at Klaus, so helpless — and at Violet, just as helpless but with a developing sense of herself, too — he knows that she increasingly thinks of Lemony and the way he was snatched from his cot, the way they all huddled together late at night and missed their parents, the way they only had one another for comfort.

This conversation has been revisited at regular intervals. They will never allow their own children to face the trauma they did — that much goes without saying. But the mechanics of ensuring as much are more complicated than they seem ( _ isn’t everything? _ ). How often will they wake up in the middle of the night, even when Klaus is not crying, to check that they are still there? Every time Violet does something ingenious for a child of her age (often), they solemnly agree never to tell anyone else, lest someone has the bright idea one day to snatch her away. 

That Kit and Jacques have been those mysterious figures in the night taking children from their beds should make the issue cut and dry (that  _ he _ has been is an issue they simply will not discuss). If they wish to make a clean break with their prior mistakes, they should withdraw away from their old associates, make their lack of allegiance clear, and go about their lives as if they were, or ever could be, ordinary. 

But their childhood memories are not of their own parents, of days spent feeding ducks by the lake and rainy walks and bedtime stories — these are the things they hope Violet will have when she is older. They remember only their found families. All with identical, serious eyes, all with matching ankles. It is all they have. It is remarkably easy not to think of how  _ wrong _ that is, before you have any children of your own. 

So, to leave them all behind is hardly easy. Perhaps this accounts for why he cannot refuse Kit when she calls, and — less proudly — why he cannot find the words to give his wife a warning ahead of time. As Kit Snicket arrives in their doorway, rain-drenched and rubbing at her eyes, Bertrand sees the way Beatrice's spine stiffens, the way her arms tighten and her hand rests protectively around the silken curls at the back of Klaus’s head. She disappears upstairs, with only an incline of her head to the visitor, as if there are not years of memories between them. In her silver dressing gown, with that cloud of dark hair, she looks almost like a strangely domestic stormcloud. 

When they are finished and he comes upstairs, Violet has been plucked from her toddler bed and placed into their own, sleeping soundly with her mother curled protectively around her. Klaus is asleep in the crib, which has been drawn marginally closer beside their bed. He sighs. 

Beatrice doesn’t need to say anything. She observes him with her dark eyes, usually so warm, and then turns her face away in miserable disappointment. 

Part of him wants to remind her that Kit is their very dearest friend. That they have known her and loved her for their entire lives, that she is part of them, that the ring Beatrice wears now was pressed into his palm by her, too, with patient reassurances that there were no two people in the world better suited. But she knows all of that already.

“She came here to talk about Anwhistle Aquatics,” he explains, calmly and frankly. They are not the type of couple who wrangle loudly over their disagreements. 

Her voice is low, the perfected volume required not to rouse an infant and a toddler. “I don’t want to know what she was here to talk about.”

The Beatrice of his youth would hate nothing more than being left out of the loop, but they are getting older now and there is enough for them to concentrate on here without the oppressive presence of the organisation that brought them together looming over them. She read the article too. Over breakfast, in fact, with Klaus on her lap smearing porridge over his cheeks and Violet babbling at her side.

“Alright.” he comes over to sit beside her, his rightfully paranoid wife. Toeing off his shoes, he shuffles close and props himself on one arm behind her, squeezing her shoulder with his other hand. 

They trade sentiments wordlessly. The kiss he presses to the back of her head is the apology for his cowardice. The way he curls an arm around her waist to hold her is another, for finding it harder to keep to their shared convictions in reality than in theory. Her thumb drawing circles on the back of his wrist is hers, for bringing Violet into their bed again which she has already promised to try to stop doing, and for what she is going to do next.

“I can’t do it,” she whispers, with the line of her gaze directed at her daughter, and their fragile son through the pale bars of his cot. “I can’t trust anyone, now that we have them.” 

It isn’t a matter of anyone. It’s a matter of  _ these _ people, the ones they grew up with and loved so fiercely. Not as much, it turns out, as they love their children. “We don’t have anything to fear from Kit,” he attempts, in a voice barely louder than an exhale. “Not from any of our closest friends.”

“Perhaps not,” she agrees, though she doesn’t sound as convinced as he does of that, and emphasises the  _ perhaps _ in a way that makes his stomach hurt. She shifts her weight marginally in his arms to face him. “But what will happen when they’re older?”

He frowns. Until now, they have primarily worried about keeping them safe when they are small — safe from recruitment, and from any other evil in the world that might hurt them. 

“Will we monitor everything they hear?” she asks him, her eyes searching, scanning his face for an answer to this impossible question. “How can we keep them safe if they find out —” she pauses, and swallows. “If they know about everything that has happened? If they know all the things we have done?”

The truth is, they do not know anything about how to be parents. All new parents feel this way, he has heard, but they are operating completely in the dark, with no memories as a framework to guide them, with the shame of their mistakes hanging over them, just out of their young children’s sight, as they go about teaching them a moral code they have not always followed. For now, they are happy enough, and they are adored, and isn’t that the main thing, isn’t that what the books say? (Sometimes, he reads these and feels they may as well have been written by an alien species). But Beatrice is increasingly kept awake by it, and in the dark one night, not long ago, she whispered  _ are we going to break them?  _

He is not even certain of his own position in the argument they might be having, but all he can think about now is the fact that he might never see Kit again, or that one day they might not be there to provide this kind of constant protection for their children. As with everything, there is no one correct answer. “But how can we keep them safe if they don’t?”

“Because they’ll never need to know.” Her voice is soft, but her eyes are hard and determined. “Because the two of us —  _ just _ the two of us — will keep them safe.”

_Forever?_ _Every second?_ he wants to ask, because it seems an impossibly long time. Before he can think of a way to put into words the difficulty of the task they are embarking on -- they will be lonelier than ever, without any of their trusted associates, without anyone to turn to, without any knowledge of the dangers outside — his wife nods, as if she can hear the question in his mind. “If anyone could,” she whispers, smiling sadly. “It would be you.”

  
  



End file.
